A kitchen trial in Baku: how a head chef chose cooks two thousand kilometres from Lviv

01 / Baku, 8:00

An omelette the head chef can see but cannot taste

Saturday, eight in the morning in Baku, seven in Lviv. The kitchen of a restaurant near Baku Boulevard is still closed to guests, the burners are lit on three stations, and above each chopping board a phone is fixed to a tripod. Rashad stands at the first station, straightens the sleeve of his chef's jacket and waits. On the laptop Elchin has propped on the shelf opposite is Bohdan, head chef of the hotel chain. He is sitting in the still empty kitchen of the new hotel in Lviv, where the ranges have not yet been connected, holding a printed sheet of criteria.

For many years Bohdan has given the same first task to every cook he hires: an omelette. Rashad cracks the eggs, beats them with a fork, puts butter in the pan and waits until it stops foaming. Bohdan asks him to tilt the pan towards the camera, watches the omelette roll without a single brown spot, and asks him to cut it in half right in front of the lens. Inside it is soft, just as it should be.

Rashad is thirty-eight. For eleven years he worked in the kitchens of large hotels in Baku, on breakfasts and banquets for several hundred guests, and in Ganja his wife and two daughters are waiting for him while he finishes building their house. Bohdan looks at the omelette and tells Elchin that he can see everything but cannot taste it. That was the central question of the whole project: how do you choose a cook you cannot taste?

A screen shows the knife, the heat and the plate. Taste does not come through a screen, and it needs a solution of its own.

02 / The task

A new hotel in Lviv and ten cooks the chef wants to see at the stove

Two weeks before that morning, a chain of three hotels in Lviv and the Carpathians came to us with a task. The fourth hotel was due to open in Lviv in two and a half months, with a restaurant and a banqueting hall, and its kitchen needed ten cooks: six for the hot kitchen and four for the cold kitchen. Olena, who runs client projects at WORKIN, took down the task, and Bohdan set his condition straight away: not a single cook hired from a CV. He wanted to see each of them at the stove.

Bohdan's usual method is a trial day in his own kitchen. With foreign workers that is not possible. Citizens of visa-free countries can enter Ukraine, but visa-free entry does not give the right to work, and a trial day in a hotel kitchen is already work. Employing a foreigner without a work permit means a fine for the employer of twenty minimum wages for each person. So the cook has to be tested in their own country, before the permit application is filed.

Bohdan could not travel to the trial himself: before the opening he had a new menu, a new kitchen and a local team still to recruit. Kemal, our head of recruitment, proposed a trial that would not require the chef to leave Lviv: a partner's kitchen in the candidates' country, tasks taken from the hotel menu and a camera over every station. We had run a similar trial for welders in Baku, but there the chief welder came in person, as described in the scenario on a welding test before the permit. This time everything had to happen through a screen.

Who is needed

6 hot kitchen cooks and 4 cold kitchen cooks

Timing

Hotel opening in two and a half months

Chef's condition

See every cook at work before approval

Constraint

The chef cannot travel, and a trial in Ukraine before the permit is not possible

03 / Why Azerbaijan

Big hotel kitchens in Baku and a language shared with the head chef

The chain did not name a country, and Kemal set out the options using our usual criteria: experience of hotel kitchens specifically, the language the cook would speak with the chef, the route against the opening date and the chance to run a trial in a real kitchen in the candidates' country. For a hotel, experience in a neighbourhood restaurant and experience in a kitchen that feeds hundreds of guests at breakfast and banquets are different things, so that line came first.

Over the past fifteen years many large international hotels have opened in Baku, and resort complexes operate on the Caspian coast and in Gabala. So Azerbaijan has cooks who know a European menu, banquet service and working to recipe cards. Bohdan speaks Ukrainian and Russian, and Russian is widely spoken in Baku, so the chef and the cooks could understand each other in the kitchen without an interpreter. Citizens of Azerbaijan enter Ukraine without a visa, and the four-to-seven-week route fitted the opening date with room to spare.

The last criterion settled it. Our licensed partner in Baku works with a restaurant in the city centre that is closed to guests until eleven in the morning and has three fully equipped stations. In a kitchen like that, a trial can be run on real ranges rather than in a classroom. Olena showed the chain the comparison, and it agreed to Azerbaijan.

04 / Criteria

What a camera can show, and what has to be checked another way

Before looking for people, Kemal and Bohdan spent two evenings working out the criteria. There was one rule: we assess only what the chef can genuinely see, or what someone on site can check by answering his questions. Anything that did not pass that filter was struck off the sheet, so that no cook would be judged on impressions.

Bohdan took the tasks from the new hotel's menu. For the hot kitchen: an omelette, chicken breast with a creamy mushroom sauce and a vegetable side with evenly sized cuts. For the cold kitchen: a salad in three identical portions and twenty-four banquet canapés in twenty minutes. We translated the hotel's recipe cards into Russian and Azerbaijani, keeping every gram, and each candidate received their card fifteen minutes before the start rather than in advance: the chef wanted to see how a person reads an unfamiliar card.

Taste was the hardest part. Bohdan could not taste a single plate, so we broke taste down into three questions another person could answer honestly: is there enough salt, too little or too much; does the sauce hold its body or split; is the meat juicy or dry. The answers came from the sous-chef of the restaurant whose kitchen hosted the trial. Elchin stuck a strip with a number on every plate, and the sous-chef did not know whose dish was in front of him.

05 / The trial

Three mornings in Baku: a camera over the board, scales in shot and numbered plates

The partner collected thirty-four CVs from cooks in Baku, Ganja and Sumgait, each with photos of dishes the person had cooked in their own kitchen. Elchin, our manager for workers from Azerbaijan, spoke to every one of them in Azerbaijani and Russian: which kitchens they had worked in, how many guests the kitchen fed, whether there were banquets, whether they had a passport with enough validity left. Under our contract with the partner, candidates pay nothing for the interview or the trial, and the project covered the ingredients and travel from Ganja and Sumgait. Elchin invited eighteen people to the trial.

The trial ran on three consecutive mornings with six candidates each: two rounds of three people on three stations, an hour and a half per round. Elchin was in the kitchen: he handed out the recipe cards, moved a phone to the plate when the chef asked for a closer look, and translated into Azerbaijani if anyone did not understand a question. Kemal joined the call from Kyiv and filled in the score sheet for every criterion, so that Bohdan could watch the cook rather than the paper.

After each task Bohdan asked the cook a few questions in Russian. What would you do if the sauce split a minute before service? What would you start first if the chicken, the sauce and the side all had to be on the plate at the same time? The answers went on the score sheet too: the chef wanted to hear how a person thinks at the stove, not only to see what they can do.

Gunel, twenty-nine, had spent six years in the cold kitchen of a banqueting hall in Sumgait. She made twenty-four canapés in seventeen minutes, and when Elchin weighed them one by one, the difference between the lightest and the heaviest was two grams. Bohdan asked to see the tray again and was silent for a long moment, then asked Kemal to put Gunel at the top of the cold kitchen list.

06 / The decision

Farid cuts fastest but seasons by eye

Farid is twenty-four, and at the trial he was the fastest. He cut the mushrooms and onions more evenly than anyone, cooked the chicken perfectly, and his plating was almost identical to the photo in the menu. But he did not weigh the salt for the sauce, he seasoned by eye, and on the strip with his number the sous-chef wrote that there was too much salt. Bohdan explained to Elchin that in a hotel serving the same menu to hundreds of guests the recipe card is law, and a cook who seasons by eye will get it right today and wrong tomorrow.

Bohdan did not want to turn Farid down straight away: his knife work was the best of the whole trial. We offered him a second trial four days later, and Elchin passed on the chef's comments to Farid word for word. At the second trial Farid said the grams aloud before every ingredient, and on all three questions the sous-chef noted that the dish was exactly as it should be. Bohdan put him first in the hot kitchen reserve.

Of the thirteen people who passed the trial, Bohdan approved ten and kept three in reserve: Farid and Orkhan for the hot kitchen and Sabina for the cold kitchen. We did not just list the reserve on a spreadsheet. Elchin told each of the three that they might be asked to travel as a replacement at any point in the project, and asked them to keep their passports and documents ready.

The reserve was needed even before the permits were filed. Elnur, one of the approved hot kitchen cooks, called Elchin: his father had fallen ill, and he had decided to stay close to his family. Elchin thanked him for being honest and for saying so before the filing. The same day Farid took Elnur's place, and Bohdan had already seen him at work twice, so the permit was filed from the outset for the person who would actually travel.

1. 01

   Rashad

   Hot kitchen. Omelette right first time, 11 years in Baku hotels, breakfasts and banquets.

2. 02

   Gunel

   Cold kitchen. 24 canapés in 17 minutes, a two-gram difference in weight.

3. 03

   Farid

   Hot kitchen. A second trial to the recipe card, from the reserve into the main group.

4. 04

   Reserve

   Orkhan and Sabina: passed the trial, documents ready for a replacement.

07 / Documents

The position of cook in the permit and a diploma the law does not require

Nataliia, head of our documents team, collected the chain's documents using the company checklist while selection was under way. We checked the job title against the new hotel's staffing table: all ten permits say "cook", as do the draft employment contracts, and the split between the hot and cold kitchens is the chef's decision within that same position. That way the permit, the contract and the staffing table all say the same thing.

Bohdan wanted to keep culinary school diplomas in the personnel files. We explained that for a permit the law requires an application, copies of passport pages with a certified Ukrainian translation, a photo, a draft employment contract certified by the employer and proof of payment, and that asking for documents beyond that is prohibited. Not everyone had a diploma, and a permit does not need one. Each cook's skill was confirmed by the trial score sheet, photos of the plates and the sous-chef's answers, and those who had diplomas brought them along.

We filed the ten permit applications in week four of the project. A decision on issuing a permit is made within seven working days, and all the permits were ready in week five. Meanwhile every cook received an information sheet in Russian and Azerbaijani: the hotel and housing address, the job title and salary from the contract, the contract term, which documents to carry at the border and how to answer questions about the purpose of the trip. Orkhan and Sabina in the reserve received the same sheet, so a replacement would not have to start from scratch.

1. Week 1

   Request, choice of country, trial criteria, recipe cards with grams.

2. Week 2

   34 CVs with photos of dishes, Elchin's calls, 18 invitations to the trial.

3. Week 3

   Three trial mornings in Baku, Farid's second trial, the chef's approval.

4. Week 4

   Elnur replaced from the reserve, 10 permit applications filed, information sheets.

5. Week 5

   Permits issued, tickets, document folders for the border.

6. Week 6

   The group enters Ukraine, housing, contracts, residence permit filings, first day in the kitchen.

08 / Arrival

From the border checkpoint to the kitchen the chef had shown on screen

We bought tickets only after the permits were issued. The group of ten cooks arrived in Chisinau and went on by coach to a checkpoint on the Ukrainian border. Everyone had a folder with their passport, a copy of the permit, the hotel's invitation and confirmation of housing, and when the border officer asked about the purpose of the trip the cooks answered as we had rehearsed with them: work as a cook in a hotel in Lviv under an issued permit. Elchin met the group on the Ukrainian side, and they all travelled on together by minibus.

We arranged housing near the hotel as part of living support and checked its documents before the permits were even filed, because they are needed both for address registration and for residence permits. The hotel signed employment contracts with all ten in the first days, and we filed the copies within the 10-day term. Tax numbers and bank accounts were done in the first week, and the temporary residence permit filings started straight away, without waiting for the ninety days of visa-free stay to run down.

On the day the contracts were signed, Bohdan met the cooks in the new hotel's kitchen, the one he had shown them on screen three weeks earlier, before the ranges were connected. The menu, training and assigning people to stations are the chef's business, and that is where our part ended. Everyone received a guide in Azerbaijani with Elchin's phone number, and we continue to handle the group's documents under migration support.

Before showing the cooks their stations, Bohdan asked Rashad to make an omelette. This time he tasted it.

09 / Summary

Ten cooks the chef chose without leaving Lviv

Criteria

Six criteria agreed with the head chef before the search began

Trial

18 cooks over three mornings in a partner's kitchen in Baku

Taste

Blind tasting of numbered plates, three questions from the chef

Approval

10 cooks and 3 in reserve, one replacement from the reserve before filing

Documents

10 permits for the position of cook, issued in week five

Timing

Six weeks from the request to the first day in the kitchen

Distance is no obstacle to testing a cook, provided the skill is broken down into what can be seen and what another person on site can honestly judge. That is how we work when a company wants to see people at work before they travel: we build a trial in the candidates' country, lawfully and to the company's own criteria. The WORKIN replacement guarantee runs for at least 6 months from the worker's first shift, provided the agreed working, pay and housing conditions are kept, and in this project a replacement would come from a reserve the chef has already seen at the stove. How we checked sales staff's language by video in Azerbaijan is covered in the scenario on selection for a retail chain, a remote trial for CNC operators from India in the scenario on a furniture factory, and a bakers' trial in Tashkent in the scenario on a bakery. The whole journey is described on How it works. More on the pages on workers for HoReCa, recruitment and workers from Azerbaijan.

10 / FAQ

Questions and answers